Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

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Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war. In Men at War, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to recognise men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men - including those in his own family - Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life. A British military map-reading class in Egypt, November 18th, 1941. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Where Men at War’s memoirist approach falters is in Turner’s reluctance to consider himself critically within the already-substantial canon of queer men’s uneasy desire for England. Turner cites Derek Jarman’s film War Requiem, an adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s 1962 opera (in turn based on Wilfred Owen’s poetry) as a life-changing encounter with ‘a portrait of Britishness that was a safety net for someone trying to untangle ideas of patriotism and desire’. At times, his preoccupation with memory glides over the uglier, harder aspects of commemoration. He writes that he wishes the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park could be rebuilt to create ‘a sensation of grace and light’, ignoring the fraught negotiation required in commemorating a service also responsible for the firebombing of Dresden. Not for nothing did Churchill exclude Bomber Command from his 1945 victory speech. The memorial has been defaced by anti-war activists repeatedly since it was first unveiled in 2012. Turner prefers to explore the lives of everyday actors, figures such as Henry Denton, an army officer who became a ballet dancer after being found ‘temperamentally unfit’ to fight by military tribunals. Turner uses firsthand accounts by gay men such as Peter de Rome (who served in the Royal Air Force) and Quentin Crisp (who was rejected on account of ‘sexual perversion’) to demonstrate the variety of queer experiences during the war, and the need for nuanced study of those experiences. Comparing British memory of the war with that of other countries, Turner asks why British soldiers are not remembered alongside Japanese and German men as potential perpetrators of sexual violence, despite evidence of these crimes during the Allied occupation of Germany and postwar colonial uprisings. My childhood was peopled by many such men, as well as widows of those who had not returned, their brief coupling preserved in wedding photographs, with the doomed groom in uniform. Men at war, I learnt, come in many guises, and that is the theme Luke Turner pursues, in a confessional curate’s egg of a book that is also a meditation on masculinity and his own sexual identity.

He’s not judgemental, though: this fascination, he suggests, stems from a “solidarity in geekiness” that, in a way, disrupts modern notions of masculinity. “It gives them the means to imagine themselves away from the cultural expectations of their day,” Turner writes. “I know because I was one of them.” So yes, my review is written with a slightly jaundiced eye: not that that should put you off reading what I see as a very worthy book, one that is linked to a definitive marking of time, where Luke Turner takes on an unenviable – but vital task of reminding us that yes; we need to mention the war.

Both Winn and Turner’s books are now part of a growing history and literature that provide a corrective to past accounts of the kind of men who won the world wars. In Memoriam sits alongside the Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker’s series of historic novels in which Sassoon, Graves and Owen appear as characters, doing the valuable service of reminding us that the real-life queer men who inspired these books were just as likely to act heroically in the trenches as the straight men they fought alongside. The book is framed by the author’s own biography — relatives who served in World War II and Turner’s obsessive childhood interest in war films and model kits, enthusiasms that made him an oddball outlier at school, adding to the perplexities that came with his growing realisation of his bisexuality. But the book’s heart is a series of other biographies — wartime personal stories for which Turner draws on memoirs, novels, letters and service records. Dudley Cave ends up in a brutal Japanese POW camp, half-starved and resisting the sexual advances of a Japanese guard. After the war, Cave is a gay activist, fighting for LGBT+ inclusion in Britain’s war-remembrance ceremonies. Ian Gleed is an RAF fighter ace whose status allows him to be almost open about his gay relationships, among his RAF peers. Gay love was far from universally frowned on during wartime; RAF officers in make-up could be seen having fun around Piccadilly Circus. Yet, in Gleed’s 1942 memoir, Arise To Conquer, a longterm male lover becomes a woman called Pam. Just-published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Luke Turner’s ‘Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-45’ is a moving, multifarious meditation on all the ways we love each other, even while we’re killing each other, finds Roy Wilkinson. Men At War does not perpetuate romantic myths. Turner notes how “post-war struggles with mental health and PTSD impacted the generations on”. Britain’s victory had a high psychological price many would argue we’re still paying. Television Interview Lauren Graham: 'Why are men still surprised they like Gilmore Girls?' Read More

He likens the experiences of men who explored homosexual desire and gender expression with his own difficulty accepting his bisexuality: “Even if these activities had been evidence of their true bisexual selves,” Turner writes, “it’s not surprising that they would deny them.” In Men at War, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to recognise men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men – including those in his own family – Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life. There are conscientious objectors, a bisexual Commando, a pacifist poet who flew for Bomber Command, a transgender RAF pilot, a soldier who suffered in Japanese POW camps and later in life became an LGBT+ activist, and those who simply did what they could just to survive and return home to a complicated peace.

Here we get echoes to Turner’s last book Out of the Woods, and the chapters exploring this less-trodden arena of wartime sexuality are where Men at War most succeeds in its rehumanisation of the war and where Turner’s prose is most alive. Whereas as a child, he felt connected to the minutiae and machinery of the Second World War, it’s now in this exploration of masculinity and desire that his interest is clearly piqued.This false presentation of wartime masculinity has left it open for idolisation. Visiting a convention for tank enthusiasts, Turner writes about his queasiness watching punters queuing up to take selfies with infamous German tank the Tiger, which was likely to have “killed thousands of our forebears”.

What they are imagining, though, is a falsehood. While there was certainly bravery, these men of war weren’t all “ideologically committed to the fight”. Nor were they all exemplary studies of so-called “normal” masculinity. In fact, Turner argues, the myth of “brave boys doing their bit” has erased “the rough and ready nature of male desire”. This fascinating, intricate examination of World War II and desire and sexuality has a rich cast. It ranges from Wanker Bill — a British serviceman said to have even ‘wanked between wanks’ — to the likes of the storied journalist, commando and poet Captain Michael Burn. As a child, Luke Turner was obsessed with the Second World War. Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war.

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Then there is the issue of the wider cultural and social audience for all this terrible, miserable stuff about the mass killing of other human beings in the name of politics and “progress”. Professor Dan Todman once stated of memories garnered about the First World War that the sometimes ghoulish collecting and categorising of stories “raises the problem of whose culture is under investigation”. The bravery in, and of, Luke Turner’s book is the reason you should read it. Turner compellingly records the bravery of those who chose not to fight, but to find resistance in continuing to ballet dance on a London stage as the doodlebugs fall; or the bravery to talk about the inability to push a bayonet into another’s flesh and hear the often reported “hiss” as a life escapes the body. All of this we need to read and process, and reflect on.